Sons of Loki

After an impromptu meeting with Suzuki-sensei at 6pm today, it was established that due to my low mark of 63.9 (C) I will be repeating level 300 instead of moving up to 400 with everyone else. Also, I think I was advised to do all the auxiliary lessons (the speaking, listening, reading and writing classes) and the kanji class too. There goes my free time!

That’s not set in stone. I could still push for 400, I reckon. But, I dunno. It might be best to cut my losses and concentrate on the Leeds exam.

I’m doing joint honours English and Japanese at the moment. I am informed that there is a possibility of applying for straight BA English in May, which would entail basically dropping Japanese and reverting to my remaining two years of English in 2010/11 and 2011/12.

Do I want to do that? Not really. I do want to finish Japanese, but at the same time, in all honesty, I’m just not putting the work in.

Suzuki-sensei asked me today why I’m doing Japanese, and for the first time I gave the honest answer: I like living in Tokyo. I adore this city. I always tell people “Well I liked anime when I was younger,” or “I like Japanese culture”, but the simple truth is I like living here more than England. (In some respects. I do miss home.) No crime, great transport, exciting events, the bustle of a megapolis; it’s everything I want. I mean, you can walk the streets at 3am and never, ever feel threatened. You know how much more pleasant that is than in England? I don’t want to go all Daily Mail, but it’s little things like that.
And I don’t really need a degree to live here: obviously it would help with getting a job but right now, I know enough Japanese to survive here. I realised that when I went to get my bike fixed – just a minor errand, and my Japanese went off without a hitch, and it was sorted. I know enough to get anything done. I’m pretty much illiterate beyond kids’ manga and I can’t really hold an interesting conversation, but I can Get By.

So if I can get by, the question becomes what am I learning Japanese for? I’m not really sure. Obviously if I could be fluent I would. If I had a roadmap for fluency, I’d follow it. But that seems an awful long way away (and it is) and right now I’m sort of okay and I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to get better, but that doesn’t really bother me, y’know? (And yet it does…)

What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.

–Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Bah! Who needs love? Here’s the top five anti-love songs (that I could find on YouTube. Depressingly, the fantastic “I’m Not In Love” by Talking Heads (entirely different to the 10cc song of the same name) couldn’t be found.)

Richard Ashcroft – A Song for the Lovers
I love Ashcroft’s counterpoint baritone mumble in the video as he sings along to his own song. Diegetic cleverness, there. This song beat out “Love is Noise” in the running, but both depict love as a kind of unpleasant anxiety, which is far more preferable to sentimental pap.

Pulp – F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E.
Different Class is just all over a great album, and this is a fantastic love song that basically sums up the incomprehensible gut-punch of love.

Belle and Sebastian – Funny Little Frog
This is probably my all-time most listened song, but I just can’t get over it. I think I first heard of it as the only B&S song at OK Karaoke in Leeds, but back then I hadn’t heard their album The Life Pursuit, so I just thought it was a song about, uh, a funny little frog, so I never sang it.
At first listen, it’s just about loving someone. Then you realise it’s about loving someone you can’t have. Then you begin to suspect it’s all about loving some ideal girl, some soulmate you have yet to meet and who may not even exist. (I read an interesting theory that it’s actually about the Virgin Mary, which puts a new spin on the lyrics, but I prefer the secular interpretation.)

Absentee – We Should Never Have Children
A title like that says it all, right? “Some people never should have met,” intones the gravelly-voiced Dan Michaelson.

Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t've?)
To which we can all answer, “Yes.”

Depressing!